Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired power to extend the institution's control. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to find out more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial crisis emanating out from that area. The extract is seen by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably connected with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her fate are revealed to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her private quest to rejoin with her companion and recover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a broader battle with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems always have, is striving to stifle independence of reason, innovation and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the unveiling of a series of unusual fissures in the fabric of the world's air: gateways that seem to give on to other worlds. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict reason and back to instinct, however, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between purity and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
